From a bombed headline to a 'welcome, fellow blogger'.

How not to write a headline...

Despite the scary headline, this insing.com story is not as sensational as it seems. The 16 bombs are old, World War 2 bombs. True, safety issues are involved since even old bombs can go off. But the unintended impression given here is that terrorists have planted 16 bombs! This is no joke, as baby boomers will recall the Konfrontasi years when indeed terrorists had planted a series of bombs in several places here.

A better headline is "16 WW2 bombs found at East Coast site".

-----------------------------------------------------

I don't know why headline writers still insist on "fresh grads/graduates" (when do they turn stale?) when "new grads/graduates" (in reference to newly-graduated) is the better choice. Both ST and TODAY earn my ire on this one:

------------------------------------------------------------

Many people, including journalists (unforgiveably), use "biennial" and "biannual" interchangeably. It can't be done. The former means "once in two years" and the latter means "twice a year". Likewise, strictly speaking, "bi-weekly" means "twice a week", not "once every two weeks". A good word for the latter is "fortnightly".

So, if your doctor says "These pills should only be taken bi-weekly or you will lose all your hair", you better ask him what does he mean by "bi-weekly"!

Here's an interesting debate on these tricky words:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Talk:biweekly

And here's the wrong use of "biannual"... the first Cybertron Con (convention) was held in Shanghai in 2010. I believe the idea to hold this event as a biennial one:

And while the example below is from a print ad rather than a headline, it is yet another example of the misuse of "talents", as I have previously blogged about (also, the word "live" here is meaningless):

-------------------------------------------------

From "ride on" to "write on"?

http://news.insing.com/tabloid/smrt-chief-saw-phaik-hwa-starts-blog/id-2d393f00

Anyway, a welcome to a fellow blogger!